Marianne Saegebrecht is the hefty goddess familiar from Percy Adlon's movies (Sugarbaby and Bagdad Cafe). In her most, you should pardon the expression, full-bodied role yet, she plays an unlettered but wise maid in the marvelous, bittersweet Martha and I. The story takes place on the eve of WWII in Czechoslovakia, with a coda after the war. Director/writer Jiri Weiss tells the tale through the reminiscences of Emil (Ondrej Vetchy), an engaging young man whose misbehavior with the maid gets him shipped off by his parents to the comparative paradise of a relative's home. His Uncle Ernst (Michel Piccoli) is a renown obstetrician, a man of wit and culture and generous opinions--the perfect counter-influence on a young man used to the smothering snobbishness of his mother and his aunts.

Ernst, as observed by his admiring but not doting nephew, dominates the story. After catching his younger wife in bed with a lover, the doctor divorces her and impulsively marries his maid, Martha (Saegebrecht), much to the fury of his own sisters and of Martha's family. The class differences between them is bad enough, but a Jew--even an atheist like Ernst--marrying a German in Sudetenland, on the verge of the annexation by the Nazis, could not go unnoticed. As the Holocaust looms, Martha and Ernst have a wedge driven between them by both those who wish them well and those who hate them.

Weiss was himself an exile from the Nazis, making his first film more than 50 years ago; he also left Prague ahead of the tanks in 1968. Martha and I, which is semiautobiographical, doesn't have the limpness of sheer nostalgia. Weiss looks at the story with the abstract fatalism of someone displaced in his time by both communists and fascists. Still, Martha and I has the softness of a story much remembered, like the texture of a letter folded and reread many times. This, you feel, is what the past was must have been like--so much confidence existing with so much naiveté. Piccoli's warm but salty portrayal of the doctor is a delight to watch, but Saegebrecht's heartbreaking Martha steals the film. Hers is a portrait of a woman of uncommon decency set off by gently maternal humor.

Martha and I, (Unrated; 107 min.), directed and written by Jiri Weiss, photographed by Viktor Ruzicka and starring Michel Piccoli and Marianne Saegebrecht.